Using lures for hunting is rare in the animal kingdom and has been demonstrated in only a handful of species including primates, birds and crocodiles. This cognitive ability is just one example of causal understanding and advanced intelligence that many animals possess. This and other higher functions such as motor control, reasoning, perception and planning are credited to vastly different anatomical structures across animal groups. While the overall architecture may be different, the common denominator is the neuron and its connective topologies.
A neural processing unit (NPU) hardware device has been developed referred to as Thermodynamic RAM (kT-RAM), which provides a physical adaptive computing resource, allowing for the exploration of different neural architectures or modules built up from calls to kT-RAM's instruction set. kT-RAM is adaptive hardware operating on the principles of AHaH computing, a new technology where processor and memory are united. Much like a graphical processing unit (GPU) accelerates graphics, kT-RAM plugs into existing computer architectures to accelerate machine learning operations.
This opens up the possibility of providing computer hardware with the ability to perceive and act on information flows without being explicitly programmed. Much as a central processing unit (CPU) carries out instructions of a computer program to implement any arbitrary algorithm, kT-RAM is also general purpose, in that it does not enforce any specific network topology. The topology can be defined in software, and this flexibility allows for kT-RAM to be configured for different machine learning applications requiring different network topologies such as trees, forests, meshes, and hierarchies. A simple instruction set allows for various forms of synaptic adaptation, each useful within specific contexts.